"Stare at Michelangelo casts.
Go out into the street. stare at the people. Go
into the subway. Stare at the people. Stare, stare,
keep on staring. Go into your studio; stare at
your pictures, yourself, everything."– Reginald
Marsh

Reginald
Marsh :
painter & illustrator

(1898-1954)

Born: Paris, France.
Relocated to U.S. in 1900 –
Nutley, New Jersey.

Above:
Self-Portrait cartoon; 1949.

Biography

Reginald Marsh was
born in Paris on March 14, 1898. His father, Fred
Dana Marsh, was a well-known muralist, and his
mother, Alice Randall Marsh, was also an artist
who painted miniature watercolors. Marsh returned
with his family to the United States in 1900 and
grew up in Nutley, New Jersey.

After graduating from Yale University in 1920,
Marsh moved to New York, where he worked as an
illustrator for the New York Evening Post and
Herald, Vanity Fair and Harper's Bazaar. Beginning
in 1922, he worked as staff artist at the New
York Daily News doing a cartoon review of vaudeville
and burlesque. During the 1920s, he designed theater
curtains for the Greenwich Village Follies and
other theater productions, and became one of the
original cartoonists at The New Yorker after it
was founded in 1925, actively working for the
magazine until 1931 and regularly contributing
drawings from time to time after that.

In 1923, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, who was
the daughter of the curator of painting at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art and herself a sculptor.
They divorced in 1933, and he married his second
wife, Felicia Meyer, a landscape painter, in 1934.

In the early 1920s, Marsh began to study painting
and attended classes taught by John Sloan and
Kenneth Hayes Miller, among others, at the Art
Students League in New York. He made several trips
to Europe, once in 1925-1926 and again in 1928,
to study the old masters in the museums. In 1929,
he began to paint in egg tempera. He also worked
in watercolor, painting several large compositions
in 1939-1940. In the 1940s, he studied the "Maroger
medium" with Jacques Maroger and began to
use this emulsion technique in his paintings.
In addition to painting, he also worked in lithography,
etching, and engraving.

Marsh had his first one-man show of oils and watercolors
at the Whitney Studio Club in 1924 and another
show of lithographs there in 1928. He had one-man
shows of his watercolors at the Valentine Dudensing
Galleries in 1927, the Weyhe Gallery in 1928,
and the Marie Sterner Galleries in 1929. In 1930,
he had his first show of paintings at the Rehn
Galleries, where he regularly exhibited for the
next two decades.

In 1935 and 1937 respectively, Marsh was commissioned
by the Treasury Department Art Program to paint
two murals in the Post Office Department Building
in Washington, D.C. and a series of murals in
the rotunda of the Customs House in New York.
Beginning in 1935, Marsh taught drawing and painting
at the Art Students League. In the summer of 1946,
he was guest instructor at Mills College, Oakland,
California, for six weeks. In 1949, he was appointed
head of the Department of Paintings at Moore Institute
of Art, Science, and Industry, Philadelphia and
taught advanced painting there in 1953-1954.

Beginning in the mid-1930s, some of Marsh's art
work began to be reproduced on greeting cards
issued by the American Artists Group and Living
American Art, Inc. He also did illustrations for
editions of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1938),
John Dos Passos's USA (1945) and Adventures of
a Young Man (1946), and Mark Twain's The Prince
and the Pauper (1946), among others. He continued
to do freelance illustrations for magazines, including
Esquire, Fortune, and Life. Notably, he served
as an artist correspondent for Life during the
Second World War, and traveled to Brazil in 1943
to draw the army installations there.
Marsh was the recipient of various awards throughout
his career, including the M. V. Kohnstamm Prize
from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1931, the
First W. A. Clark Prize and Corcoran Gold Medal
from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington,
D.C., in 1945, and the Gold Medal for Graphic
Arts of the National Institute of Arts and Letters
in 1954.

Marsh died of a heart attack in Dorset, Vermont
on July 3, 1954.

This
biographical note draws heavily from information
originally printed in the catalogue of the Reginald
Marsh Retrospective Exhibition organized by the
Whitney Museum in 1955..

All Images are copyrighted
and strictly for educational and viewing purposes.